John McCain pushed back against critics of his proposed gasoline-tax holiday to kick off his town hall on health care in Denver Friday, calling critics Washington insiders who rode around in limousines.

“Why don’t we give American men and women a break for the summer?” the apparent Republican nominee for president said. “Just a little break for the summer.”

McCain has been joined in his call for a suspension of the federal tax of 18 cents a gallon for gasoline and 24 cents on diesel by Democratic contender Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Rival Democrat Sen. Barack Obama doesn’t support the measure, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has ridiculed the tactic, saying it is “about the dumbest thing I’ve heard in an awful long time, from an economic point of view.”

McCain suggested the small savings that would accrue for the average family could be used to buy a child a textbook.

“Americans are hurting today,” McCain said at the meeting at the Mizel Family Cultural Arts Center at the Robert E. Loup Jewish Community Center.

“I have a plan of action to fix our economy, to make sure Americans remain in their home and to realize the American dream and educate their children.”

About 300 well-dressed, relatively quiet people filled the hall. The event was not characterized by the buttons, T-shirts and hoopla found at most campaign stops.

Outside the town hall meeting, about two dozen demonstrators gathered, a combination of anti-war protesters and those who mocked Republicans as “fat cats.”

McCain’s main agenda in Denver was to emphasize aspects of the new national health care policy he outlined earlier this week in Tampa, Fla.

“It is not the quality of health care in America that is the problem,” he said this morning. “It’s the cost and availability of care. And the inflation rate associated with health care has been in double digits, and we can’t stand that,” he said.

He repeated one of his favorite lines, that if you “adopt the programs and proposals of Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama, you will have a wasteful, costly system replaced by a more wasteful costly system because that’s what’s happened in countries that have adopted universal health care.”

McCain is trying to sell an idea to give every American family a $5,000 tax credit to buy their own health insurance and to allow them to cross state lines and look beyond employers to find the best health-insurance program for them.

He argues that advances in medical technology and in information-sharing technology allow for a revised system that installs transparency and competition to bring down costs.

He said employer-provided health care was fine for those for whom it is working but that it has not been a good solution for everyone.

“Every time that someone loses their job, we have another burden on our health-care system,” he said, drawing a connection between the ailing health care system in America and the nation’s ailing economy.

Across town, however, Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette, a Denver Democrat, took aim at McCain’s plan, calling it “feeble” and accusing McCain of giving America “more of the same” policies of the Bush administration.

DeGette, vice chairwoman of the congressional committee overseeing health care policy, said health insurance tax credits would only help those who could afford to wait a tax cycle for reimbursement.

“It helps those people who can afford to make monthly payments,” she said. “The problem is most middle-class and lower-middle-class people can’t do that.”

The first question of McCain’s town hall meeting raised one of the many criticisms being voiced about the Arizona senator’s health plan: What about those whom insurance companies won’t take due to pre-existing illnesses or conditions?

McCain said, “There will have to be a federal contribution,” and “they cannot be left behind.”

He said he has outlines of a plan to plug that hole and that states and insurance companies need incentives to work with the riskier groups.

In a phone interview, the director of the Colorado AFL-CIO, Mike Cerbo, said McCain’s health plan wouldn’t work. Cerbo also protested outside the town hall meeting.

“It’s not going to get one extra person on health insurance,” Cerbo said. “I don’t see how the 40 million who are uninsured will get insurance. He’s taken away the incentive to provide employer-based health care, (where) you buy in large pools to spread the risk.”

McCain fielded a host of questions from the audience, many of them detailing aspects of health care but also covering election politics, oil independence, the war in Iraq and how best to deal with Iran’s growing influence.

Chuck Plunkett is The Denver Post's editorial page editor. A professional journalist for more than 20 years, he served as The Post's politics editor from July 2011 through July 2016. Plunkett worked for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, his hometown paper, and for The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review before coming to The Denver Post in 2003, where he ultimately began developing his writing about politics as the newsroom's lead writer covering Denver's preparation for the Democratic National Convention in 2008.

More in News

A wedding and special events’ planning business has agreed to pay a $200,000 settlement to five employees living in the country illegally after allegedly failing to pay them minimum wages and overtime and discriminating against them because of their race.

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.